


Whole Answer

by Laylah



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Backstory, Transgender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-21
Updated: 2009-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-03 12:52:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/pseuds/Laylah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Xehanort has the easiest time with it, but that's not surprising. He doesn't remember what normal is well enough to object to something that isn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whole Answer

Dian is eight years old. She grits her teeth, screwing up her eyes so she won't cry while the nurse picks gravel out of her knee. Girls cry, and she's not like that. She's as tough as any of the stupid boys in her class. Tougher than Even, who picked a fight with her last week and lost.

"I don't know why you have to make so much trouble," the nurse says, shaking her head and reaching for the peroxide. "Always tussling like this, dear. There are easier ways to get boys to notice you."

"Hnn," Dian says, because the nurse is clearly stupid, and because the peroxide stings.

"You should ignore them if they call you names," the nurse suggests, cutting gauze, taping it over Dian's knee. "They'd stop teasing you if you didn't react like that."

Dian jumps down from the table. "It's fine," she says, and bolts for the door before the nurse can use the tear in the leg of her trousers as an excuse to try to make her wear the uniform skirt.

*

Dian is twelve years old. She knows what's happening to her but that doesn't mean she has to like it. She ignored her breasts for as long as she could, and when she finally did start wearing a bra and Braig snapped it after class one day, she gave him a black eye.

Now it's sometime in the middle of the night and she's awake because she's in pain. Her belly and her lower back and the backs of her thighs all ache, steady and pulsing. She slides out of bed, and as she stands up she feels hot wetness start to run down the insides of her thighs. There's blood everywhere by the time she makes it to the bathroom, streaked across her skin, soaking her shorts. It's gross.

When she's cleaned up she goes back to bed, but she doesn't get back to sleep for a long time.

*

Dian is fifteen years old. Braig doesn't try to snap her bra anymore; now he tries to get her out of it. They skip school on warm days and go down to the beach together, out behind the craggy rocks where nobody will see them. He takes his shirt off, and hers, too, when she lets him. They kiss. She gets a stiff neck from leaning up into him, but apart from that it feels pretty good.

She wishes he wouldn't paw at her breasts so much. They feel weird, too sensitive most of the time, and sometimes she still wonders what they're doing attached to her.

One time he gets a hand into her pants, pushes down past tight fabric and between her legs and she realizes she's wet, and his fingers feel really rough against her there, and he pushes in and she grabs his wrist. "Stop," she says.

"What's wrong?" he asks.

"It hurts," she says, and it's true but it's not the answer, or not the whole answer. She thinks she might be sick. "It -- just -- don't."

"Yeah, no problem," he says, shrugging as he pulls his hand back, but it's weird, after that.

*

Dian is seventeen years old. She loses her virginity to Elaeus because she's trying to prove something, even if she's not sure what, exactly, and then she hooks up with Braig a few more times because he's a bad habit she can't give up. She applies for the advanced study program under the direct supervision of Ansem the Wise, and gets accepted. A few people congratulate her on being the only girl to make the cut. She doesn't have a good answer for that.

A few months into their studies, their mentor finds a strange boy who has no memories, and no name, and no relatives that anyone can find. He's beautiful, and he asks questions that are hard to answer, and that's the summer that everything changes, for all of them.

*

Dilan is nineteen years old. He's been binding his breasts for the better part of a year. He's been injecting testosterone once a week for the last month.

Both of these things are easier than getting all of the others to remember to call him by a new name consistently.

Xehanort has the easiest time with it, but that's not surprising. He doesn't remember what normal is well enough to object to something that isn't. Ansem shakes his head when he thinks Dilan isn't looking, but is polite enough on the surface. Even asks too-personal questions. Braig doesn't ask any questions at all.

"Bothers you that bad, does it?" Dilan asks.

Braig shrugs. "It's weird, is all," he says.

Dilan can't argue with that.

*

Dilan is twenty-one years old. He's read too much about the surgery he's going in for; he can't help being nervous. He thinks -- he hopes -- it doesn't show.

"We should make an experiment out of you," Xehanort says, smiling faintly. "As long as the doctor's going to open you up anyway, we should get a look at your heart."

"And see if that helps make any sense of yours?" Dilan asks.

Xehanort shrugs. "We've tried just about everything else."

Dilan manages to keep smiling at the thought until he's put under.

*

Dilan is twenty-two years old.

Ansem forbids them to continue their research.

*

Dilan is two weeks dead. Radiant Garden has fallen into darkness. The hollow shells still walking -- _Nobodies_, not-Xehanort-but-Xemnas says flatly one evening, and it sticks, _we've become nobodies_ \-- seem to flounder without the direction they had for so long.

Xigbar, who fared the worst of them, with brand new scars to show for it, asks eventually, "Is this what it was like?"

"Is this what _what_ was like?" Xaldin asks. He will not volunteer information now.

"You know. Feeling -- not right like this," Xigbar says. He touches his empty chest. "Like something's always a little wrong."

Xaldin shakes his head. "This feels like nothing," he says. It's still not the whole answer.

*

The Nobodies are seven years old. "We will find a way," Xemnas says. "We are discovering others of our kind. We are not anomalies." His eyes are bright with determination, or the look of it. "We will regain all that we have lost."

Xaldin thinks of the scars under his robe, arcing like shallow crescent moons along the bottom edges of his pectoral muscles. There are some things he has lost that he does not miss.

*

Xaldin is ten years old. "Who could ever love a beast?" he murmurs, and he watches the words take root, watches disappointment settle extravagantly on the enchanted prince's features.

"You lie," the Beast snarls at him, one great paw swiping sideways. A gust of wind carries Xaldin out of harm's way. "She would -- Belle is --" and he loses the rest of the words, buries them under an animal roar.

"You have nothing to offer her," Xaldin says. "Look at you." He knows how this litany goes. He knows its truth.

But he sees Belle's face, sees everything in her heart written there as she flees into the Beast's arms, and he realizes with all the bitterness he can manage that he never had the whole answer at all.


End file.
